Sunday, August 23, 2015

Ukraine has Two Reasons for De-Communization Effort, Vyatrovich Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 23 – Vladimir Vyatrovich,
the director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, says that Kyiv has two
reasons for pursuing its de-communization effort: to undercut Moscow’s appeals
to the Soviet past in its aggression against Ukraine and to reaffirm its commitment
to becoming a normal democratic country.

Of
the former Soviet bloc, those countries which have pursued an active policy of
de-communization have moved forward, he says. “Today they are developed
democratic states for whom a return to totalitarianism is impossible.” But
those in which such de-communization has not occurred – including Ukraine,
Russia, Belarus, and the other former republics except for Moldova and Georgia
and the formerly occupied Baltic countries -- remain in a state where “democracy
is illusory and merely decorative.” Instead, they are “authoritarian.

According
to Vyatrovich, “de-communism is an inherent part of reforms on the path to the
construction of a democratic state for countries which have a communist past in
exactly the same way that de-Nazification” after World War II “was necessary
for Germany to become a normal democratic state.”